A Life More Ordinary

5 minute read

If you don’t have a lockdown project to show for the past 18 months, then stay off Instagram for the next six at least. I’m shielding myself from the social media platform right now as I do my Celtic complexion from an Indian summer. Had I not stopped scrolling, I fear emotionally I’d have wound up as prickly and irritated as my skin does in the absence of a robust SPF.

I’m envious of course; of all the incredible women who have created, crafted and pivoted their way out of the pandemic stasis. Unlikely first-time authors have presented us with fresh perspectives; occasional knitters have gone from hobbyists to fledgling fashion houses; once-haphazard gardeners have overhauled their plots with the determination of Alan Titchmarsh on an HGTV reality show – and these are just the women I know. Articles populate the internet documenting people’s lockdown passions, from quilt embroidery and mosaic-making to designing board games and beading handbags.

I, on the other hand, am emerging from lockdown empty-handed. I have crafted nothing, discovered no new hidden passion, unearthed no fresh talent and offered up nothing to the wider world. My instinct, of course, is to feel less-than – hence the virtual hiding out – but I’m learning, with the help of Matt Haig’s uplifting novel The Midnight Library, that sometimes it’s okay to feel, or to be, ordinary. It’s easier said than done, I’ll admit. We live in an era where extraordinary is the new normal: plenty of teenage girls earn more than their mothers as global TikTok stars, while young women are building personal brands at an age when I was weighing up whether or not I could afford to buy chips on the way home from the UCD bar.

In this world, ‘ordinary’ is looked on with as much scorn as polyester is in the fashion world. It seems as if standing out is all that matters.

Perhaps this is why I’ve always been drawn to books that feature anti-heroines, like Eleanor Oliphant, Tess Lohan (Academy Street) or Haig’s protagonist Nora Seed. Each of these women leads an ‘unremarkable’ life that is quiet, peripheral and routine. Each of them also feels unnecessary and unloved. In Nora’s case, a job redundancy and the death of a beloved pet pushes her to overdose, after which she finds herself presented with the opportunity to live alternative lives based on different choices she could have made over the course of her 35 years. What she discovers, and the reader along with her, is that success doesn’t necessarily make an individual happier, and that tangible achievements aren’t always the foundation of a ‘better’ life.

Over the course of these characters’ ups and downs, we discover too that they are anything but ordinary. Their lives are perceived as pedestrian, their personalities unremarkable, but only in the context of a modern culture that dictates we document every moment of our fun-loving, friend-filled lives on Instagram, because these days we’re all supposed to be madly active all of the time, even in a pandemic under level 5 restrictions. These books also explore the intriguing and very pertinent question of what constitutes a worthy contribution to the world. This is a debate that’s evolved significantly over the course of the pandemic as supermarket workers and lower-level healthcare officials receive the kind of admiration and respect previously preserved for heart surgeons and High Court judges.

I’ll admit that I’m not someone who wants to be “doing” all of the time, neither in my professional or personal life. I never have. While I’m not quite Liz from Motherland – remember the scene in which, having dropped off the kids at school, she sat on the sofa, put her feet up and stared at a black spot on the ceiling for the next couple of hours? – the simple pleasures of watching an old movie I may or may not have seen before, or sitting at the kitchen table half-listening to the radio, are as integral a part of my week as writing features, socialising with my sisters and minding my mother.

I often think I should be using this time to ‘improve’ myself: by listening to a podcast, beginning an evening class, taking up meditation, or making-over my parents’ cluttered attic into a slick studio space. So I was intrigued by a 2019 article in The New York Times which exalted the idea of doing nothing, or what the Dutch refer to as niksen. According to psychologist Sandi Mann, niksen is “when we’re not doing the things we should be doing...perhaps we don’t want to, we’re not motivated. Instead, we’re not doing very much.”

It’s the anti-Instagram existence, a complete counterpoint to the current zeitgeist which applauds doers and demonises idleness. Today, busy equates to important, which infers value, hence the rise of the term ‘multi-hyphen’ woman. It’s the ultimate signifier of status in an era where sitting still is mistaken for laziness.

But this is a wholly one-dimensional yardstick by which to measure ourselves, and according to this New York Times article, “the benefits of idleness can be wide-ranging”. Mann explains that daydreaming – which only occurs when we do nothing – “literally makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas.”

The article later made me laugh, though, as it went on to explain that, “sitting still might actually be uncomfortable at first and might take practice – like exercise – [but] choose the initial discomfort of niksen over the familiarity of busyness.” Like Liz in Motherland, I must be way ahead of the curve because I experience no discomfort in sitting still sometimes. What I need to do now is reach the same level of ease with others’ perception of me like this, because I’m outing myself as someone who likes to do nothing. Gasp. What will people think?

I looked up the word ordinary in Collins Dictionary recently, and it returned the phrase “not special”, which felt pretty damning, so I tried Merriam-Webster, which provided a much more palatable “of a kind to be expected in the normal order of events”. I like each of the words contained in this definition: “expected”, “normal” and “order”. Given the 18 months of personal change and upheaval I’ve experienced, I’m craving all of this. I want life to feel normal again, I want order in my chaotic freelance existence and I want next week, next month, and next year to be what I expect. And if that makes me ordinary, then I’m actually okay with it.

Marie Kelly, June 2021